This sort of thing nearly happened to me.

As it turns out, Honda keys — as the long-rumored urban legend goes — really do work on more than one vehicle, or at least Deanna’s did.

I don’t know about Hondas, but Toyota keys used to work on at least some cars of the same make. I know this because sometime back in 1995 when I was in the army, I had a 1989 Toyota Corolla. And so did someone else who parked in the same lot, though I didn’t know that until just a little later.

Here’s what happened.

One day on the weekend I walked out of the barracks to the parking lot and unlocked what I thought was my car. I sat down, put the key in the ignition, pressed down the clutch and started the car. Then I reached over to the gearshift and noticed in the passenger seat and on the floor were strewn all sorts of things I hadn’t left there.

My first thought was that someone broke into my car and put some trash in there, but quickly discarded (heh) that idea as it just didn’t make any sense. So I looked around a bit and realized…this was not my car.

I turned the engine off, hopped out, and found my actual car about three spaces down, behind a large truck that was concealing it from view.

I never figured out who owned the other Corolla. And from then on made sure I was getting into the correct vehicle in that parking lot especially.